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Since I'm a proponent of free (as in freedom) software, it's only fair that my website is also free. And so, I've made the "source" available on my codeberg.
Originally I had no plans to create a website. But after seeing someone waste 30 mins trying to find a "framework" just for a static blog site I said, "You know you could've learnt HTML and CSS and had the website up and running by now."
Of course, I pulled that entirely out of my ass. But I don't think I was too far off. Since I already knew basic HTML and CSS, I decided to see if I can get a basic static site up and running in 10 mins. If I remember correctly, it took me around 12~13, so not too far off indeed.
For a good amount of time, the site simply sat on my disk. It wasn't available for public consumption. But after a couple months I thought, "Ehh, why not turn it into a blog?"
Shortly after I made the site public, I tried to write my first article, Vim: view git commit log without any plugins, and realized that if you intend to post code-snippets, writing a website in pure HTML and CSS is NOT a good idea.
Simply put, you cannot just copy paste a code snippet into HTML. Lots of chars which are commonly used in code, will need to be escaped and it was overall pain.
This lead to search for some better formatting language. Initially I played
around a bit with groff-www but soon found out that doing code-blocks in
groff is also a pain.
Finally decided that markdown would be the way to go. However the popular
md2html converter lowdown was quite bloated for my needs. That's when I
realized, "Hey, the suckless guys are using markdown for their website as well.
I wonder what they use." Turns out they're using
smu, which is much smaller, simpler and more
suited for what I'm doing.
However, I'm do have some small patches that I apply to smu. They're available
on the site repo as well.
To manage compilation (markdown -> html) and uploading the html to the server, I
use a simple Makefile. Simply running make will automatically update/build
any outdated html and then running make update will push to changes to the
remote server.
The Makefile is not entirely POSIX though, but since this is just for my personal usage, don't think it needs to be POSIX. Just as long as it "werks on my machine".
Since this is not anything too serious, I wanted to go with a free webhosting service. The choice of neocities over something like github pages was pretty obvious. Neocities is open-source while github is proprietary. The websites on neocities are also more creative and has a 2000s vibe to them.
For now, I have no plans of getting my own server. But even if I do, I think I'll probably keep using neocities simply because I like their values and goals.
I'm not entirely sure on how I want to move forward with the website. So far, I've only written technology related articles/blogposts, however I don't plan on strictly keeping it that way. If I feel like it, I may write posts on other topic as well.
As for when or how frequently I will write posts, there's no fixed schedule and I intent on keeping that that way. While I'm not sure what the point of this website is or will be, I am sure that it's definitely not about turning this into a soulless chore where I'm writing things just for the sake of it.
Tags: [ blog ]
